Blog Tools from Problogger

Here goes an excellent list of tools for bloggers, including Statistics Packages, Blog Editors, News Aggregators and News Sourcing Tools, Email Subscription and Newsletter Services, and more.

Yahoo Adds Blogs to Its News Section

Yahoo! News

(via Ed Cone)


SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s online news search tool on Monday added Internet journal entries as a supplement to professional media offerings — an experiment that figures to test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.

Under Yahoo's new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant Web logs, or "blogs," displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.

Why Search Engine Optimization Matters to Small Business

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a large area that we won’t try to cover all of in this article. SEM is the implementation of a variety of search engine processes and services to help market your business via a search engine. Today, however, we are focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Optimizing your web site to perform well on search engines can be a critical part of your online success. Search engines play a large role in how people navigate the Internet, so if someone is looking for your services or products online, sooner or later they will use a search engine. Your relevance to these search results can significantly impact the ability of search engines to deliver a user to your site. Studies have shown that those sites that show up on the first page of search results for a keyword receive six times more traffic than they did prior to their appearance.

The first thing I ask a client when we begin discussing SEO is “where does your web site get its traffic?” Most successful small business web sites glean only a small percentage of their overall traffic from search engines, if any at all. They have gotten their traffic from either their current client base or their promotions on their vehicles or other traditional advertising methods. My objective at this point is to see if an SEO plan would be good for them.

The next step is to review actual Internet search usage. The tool we use most frequently for this is the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo! Search Marketing. Using this tool, we can look at past activity on the Yahoo search engine. A rule of thumb is that Yahoo represents about 25% of all search engine traffic, so when you see the number of searches associated with a term, multiply by 4 to get a general idea of Internet search demand.

Oftentimes, a keyword is typed in and the telling response of “No suggestions for this keyword” is returned. You would not believe the keywords that some business owners believe are used to find them on the web. This exercise teaches us very quickly how to jump into the seat of the search engine user. Afterwards, we fairly quickly begin to identify keywords that do apply to the business that are also experiencing at least some demand based on the Keyword Selector Tool.

Now we have some direction.

The next step is to take this list of 20 or so keywords and determine with which the best opportunities exist to optimize your site. We do this several ways. One, we simply do a search on those terms and visually see how relevant the results are and what the pay-per-click activity against that keyword is. I typically just use Google and Yahoo for such research. This method is fairly ambiguous and depends a lot on experience.

Secondly, we run what is called a KEI analysis. This fancy acronym stands for a formula that looks at the demand for a particular keyword and then the supply of pages out on the Internet that are relevant to that keyword. In my opinion, opportunity exists for my client with any keyword with a KEI of 10 or higher.

Finally, we evaluate how best to deploy those keywords over your site. Should we optimize just the first page? Or should we look at creating sub-pages as well?

Once we have narrowed the list and decided on which pages to optimize, we go through the process of making your site relevant for the keyword selected. In my company, we use an optimization tool that considers the current search algorithms from Yahoo and Google (as best as they can be determined through observation) and lets us know what changes we need to make to the particular page in order for it to achieve the ideal level of relevance. Once these changes are completed, we then move on to the next page and perform the same operation until your site is relevant to the keyword selections from the previous process.

Optimizing for keyword relevancy, however, is just one battle in the effort of search engine marketing. In my next article, we will take a look at the importance of link popularity and the role it plays in placing your site above the crowd when you are all equally relevant.

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Power of Affiliate Sales

On the Internet, the classic referral system has morphed into a highly automated and accountable affiliate sales program. Utilizing an affiliate program allows you to empower other people to sell or market for you in exchange for payment per lead and payment per sale, as either a flat rate or percentage of the sale. An affiliate program offers an extremely measurable return on your investment because you only pay when a sale or lead is generated.

There are two ways to approach an affiliate program. The first is to purchase your own affiliate software and establish your own distribution network through the people and web site owners with whom you have relationships. This is the very least expensive route as well, with software typically priced at $100 or more. You determine the price per lead or per sale and there are no additional fees.

The second route, which we tend to endorse more frequently, is the inclusion of your promotions in an established affiliate system. These systems typically cost a bit more to set up, but give your web site exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential affiliates and their clients. After setup, you determine the price per lead or per sale and the affiliate system provider typically charges a percentage of that price as their fee. Typically the fees associated with the system are in direct proportion to the number and quality of affiliates that can be brought to bear upon your campaign.

Once you are an established merchant within an affiliate system, you must then gain affiliates. Affiliate web site can range from link farms – sites with hundreds of links back to merchants and their products – to well-established and high volume specialty sites. My opinion is that no link is a bad link. I tend to apply very few filters, if any, to those willing to send traffic and potential sales my way.

After commission rates, the next item that attracts affiliates are the creative graphics and promotions that your company offers. Empowering your affiliates goes beyond just establishing yourself as a merchant. Once embarking on an affiliate program, time each month should be budgeted for evaluating the performance of your ads, creation and delivery of new ad campaigns, gauging hits versus sales (conversions) and interacting with your affiliate base. The more you do to help your affiliates succeed, the more successful you will be.

A final note is that affiliate programs are not overnight success systems. You are building a network of affiliates that requires time and maintenance to be successful. This network, over time, could be enormous and truly make the difference in the success or failure of an ecommerce site, but time must be allowed for that monitored growth.

The company we recommend most for affiliate sales is ShareASale.com. Based out of Chicago, ShareASale.com has a very reasonable entry price, provides an array of tools for tracking and interacting with your affiliates and, most importantly, has over 100,000 affiliates available. Check them out at www.shareasale.com

Darryl Parker is the founder and President of Internet marketing and Charlotte web site design firm Parker Web Developers. This series on web marketing is intended to present useful tips for business owners and decision makers. The series precedes an upcoming book compiling these topics. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Blotbeat: New Analytics Tool Debuts

Blogbeat is a free tool which allows you to see who is reading your blog, what the referral sites are, graph your viewers, mow your lawn, AND MORE!!

(Thanks to Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion for finding this nugget.)

Working the Net

LinkedIn and other networking tools helping business

Paul Allen, managing partner of business incubator Infobase Ventures in Provo, Utah, likes to help entrepreneurs with advice on business plans and raising capital. But as a frequent lecturer at business schools and conferences, he recently found himself inundated with requests. So he made a new rule: If you're not a member of the LinkedIn network with a minimum of 10 connections and two endorsements on the site, don't even bother calling him. "The most important thing for an entrepreneur is not necessarily what they know, but who they know," says Allen.

Allen's prerequisite underscores the growing popularity--and scope--of online business networking tools such as Palo Alto, California-based LinkedIn Corp. These sites allow members to build networks of friends and associates, as well as gain warm introductions to investors and potential clients. "It's really automating and streamlining the historic word-of-mouth introduction process, which tends to be the best source of investment opportunities," says LinkedIn member Chip Hazard, managing general partner at Boston-based VC firm IDG Ventures.


More Than Money
Beyond just bringing entrepreneurs and investors together in a trusted context, these virtual communities are helping small businesses find potential customers, board members and other strategic business partners. READ MORE

LinkedIn.com in the news:

Who Knows Whom, and Who Knows What?
CIO Magazine, Australia - Jul 6, 2005

Laymen's Quick Start Guide to Podcasting

JSLogan

There are four tools you need to get started quickly, easily, and inexpensively: Skype, HotRecorder, Audacity, and a Plantronics Headphone. Far more robust solutions are available however; this suite gets you going fast, without emptying your wallet.

Learn more.

Caro Consulting

Teresa Caro launches her blog, Caro

Lot's of good stuff.

(Thanks to Diva Marketing for the link)

excerpt:
Yesterday, the people from Jupiter and Search Engine Watch came to Atlanta for a half day presentation and round table event—Search Engine Watch Forums LIVE!

Key take aways were...

- Dave Williams from 360i. "Watch the trends. There is tremendous growth in the vertical search market – Orbitz, Shopping.com, Froogle, and Shopzilla. Out of search new ad models have emerged – click to call, local search, day parting, demographic search, contextual search etc. Your competitors are becoming savvier with A/B testing & multi-variable optimization. More and more studies show search is a valuable component of a branding campaign."

- Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement. "To overcome search marketing challenges, use all the tools available to you... Optimized blogs & press releases and well placed, high quality links to your site. Make sure your PR team is regularly monitoring the web and is working with the marketing team to address any negative PR that crops up. Take a look at local search – 25% of today's searches."

InsideBlogging - The Blog Consulting Company

"These guys have brought blogging to the forefront for businessmen like myself. It would have taken years for many of us to learn about blogging."

Darren Barefoot, Jeremy Wright, Tris Hussey and the gang want you to know that "The brochure site is dead. Weblogs are a corporate communications tool that can provide immediate and lasting benefits to your organization."

Their clients include Inkspress, Rococo, Recruiting.com and eBusiness Connection.

Yahoo Search Goes Social: My Web 2.0

Corante > Get Real >

"I have never really adopted the use of Deli.cio.us, the best known social bookmarking and search tool. There was something about the spare, blank, austere user interface that annoyed me, so I never warmed to it. However, I am a great believer in the future of social search, so I turned to the new Yahoo My Web 2.0 with great interest, and now believe, like Waxy.org, that it is possibly a Deli.cio.us killer." MORE

Ecce...Future Tense

A fine new rollout from the good folks at Corante.

From the blog:

"Future Tense is about the trends and pressures that are forcing employers to change the way they think about the workplace. We'll be discussing management practices and collaborative tools, innovation and motivation, architecture, distributed work, mobility and gradual retirement. We will track how traditional hierarchies are breaking down and what is rising to replace them. Our goal is to look into the near future and provide useful information, case studies and interviews with leading thinkers. By identifying and discussing the multitude of trends that are reshaping work as we know it, we hope to provide a valuable resource to the people who are leading the way forward."

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?

Knowledge@Wharton


FROM THE WEBSITE:
The Internet may be entering a new phase that will decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency. But corporations that want to use the web strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such as Wikis (software that allows anyone to update and edit web pages instantly and democratically); Weblogs (online journals more commonly known as blogs); and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, which distribute content from the Internet.

Arcane as these terms may sound to anyone but the initiated, the technology behind them is hardly fancy. Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds are relatively simple tools that will have a huge impact on the way people -- and companies -- communicate and do business. So how is the Internet changing? How can companies seek to understand the technological effects of these changes? And what cultural adaptations should companies make to capture value from these new tools?

Read and learn about your future.

Momentum for small business blogging

...but check out the prices on those reports!

Forrester Research published a business blogging report last week, titled Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal? When And How Businesses Should Use Blogs, by Charlene Li, with Josh Bernoff, Tenley McHarg
(Nov. 2004; PDF; 18 pages; $349)

Other recent business blog reports/ebooks/whitepapers:

What Could Your Company Do With A Blog? How Smart Companies Use Blogs for Marketing and PR Success and How You Can Too, by B.L. Ochman.
(Oct. 2004; PDF; 105 pages; $97)

Business Blogging Starter Kit: Learn the what, why and how of blogging as a business tool, by Debbie Weil
(July, 2004; WordBiz report PDF; 127 pages; $97)

Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results With Weblogs, by Kate Kaye & Rick Bruner
(November, 2003; MarketingWonk report PDF; 103 pages; $99)

Hyperlinks available on website.

The Blog as a Business Tool

from Tenth Floor, Cleveland Ohio

Including:
Brief Introduction to the Blog
Why Should I Blog: The Benefits
What Kinds of Companies are Blogging?
Reading Blogs
Publishing Blogs
Writing for Blogs
Case in Point: Attorney Tips the Scales in His Favor Using Blog
Is a Blog Right For Me?

Ed Cone, Tech Pioneer

With blogging by businesses and organizations getting lots of media love...a look back at what may have been the first national magazine article on the topic, and certainly the best headline I ever got past an editor. (The Scoble column did not include the use of blogs as project and knowledge management tools within the enterprise -- that came later, and such blogs and wikis are still widely ignored by the press in favor of the outward-facing sites.)

Ed has been covering technology, blogging and related topics for many years in national publications, and is a columnist and blogger in Greensboro, North Carolina.

RSS Universe Delivers RSS Tools, Marketing, Publishing, & Metrics For Business People & Bloggers

Articles including one by yours truly.
Therefore a class act....

Business Blog Webring

Business Blog Webring

This is a webring for business blogs. We accept all commercial blogs about business; blogs about using blogs in business and as a marketing tool, or individual business blogs aimed at communicating with customers.

'Podcasting' Link Roundup For Saturday, May 28th, 2005

How To Blog For Fun & Profit! :: T. L. Pakii Pierce
(See Pierce's blog for hyperlinks to articles)
"Podcasting's First Aggregated Network"
An Attempt To Demystify Podcasting (A Work In Progress)
Blogging Meets Podcasting
Future of Podcasting
GM Experiments With Podcasting
It's nice to see a review of podcast styles. Why not slow down and take a look at what makes this me...
Jupiter Analysts Podcasting
Marketplace: Podcasting Is the Next Big Thing
Measuring Podcasting's Growth
More Female Podcasters
Podcast Hosting
S&P Says Podcasting Threatens Audble
The Lowdown on Podcasting
Thinking about podcasting
Two more thoughts about podcasting

And here is his 'Blogging' Link Roundup.
4 million blogs in China: report
Autoblogger: Get Started Not Blogging
Blogdigger Local: New Twist on Local Search
Blogging about Products
BlogPulse Intros Clickable Trend Charts
Bursting the Blog Bubble? I think Not
Google AdSense Blog?
Google Paying Bloggers $50 to Blog for an Hour
Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years
MSN Unveils Social Media Tools at Day 2 Keynote
Politicial Blogs Cause Bias in Google News Coverage
Ripping on the Blog Coaches
the Long Tail is indeed full of crap
The Six Figure Challenge
Wall St Journal Tech Report on Mainstream Media's Future Ignores Impact of Blogs
White paper -- The corporate blogosphere
WordPress Blogs excluded from Adsense in RSS Feed

Free Local Keyword Tool

Duct Tape Marketing ( Small Business Blog Center )

Dave Beckwith's "Idea Management" comes of age

Information Week and more on "Idea Management"

A few years ago, Information Week called me on the phone and asked me to tell him about Idea Management, since they had ascertained that I have coined the term, and had the first website on the topic. I told him I really hadn't done much with it other than create the website, which wasn't what he wanted to hear. So sorry Charlie!

Here is an article they wrote about it. Not sure if it was the one I was to be involved in.

It is amusing to see how it has grown, and now I think I will take up the reins and get back into it. First I want to see what others are doing with it.


In May, 1998...seven years ago this month, this article surfaced:

A Proposal for Web Idea Management
by Alexei Falaleev

in which the author has the following couple of paragraphs:

The term "idea management" is a little idea itself, as well as a unique word pattern that is searchable after the idea of the term appeared. I tried Altavista to check whether I was first to find it, and alas, I found that "Idea Management is a term that was coined ... by Dave Beckwith". I spent just a minute for the checking. That is the way it should be for a huge amount of little and large ideas identifiable by word patterns.

The first idea banks and idea searching tools have already appeared on the Web. They are easily searchable, so I am not going to describe them here just to show my competence. As a start point for surfing, I could recommend Idea Management.

It's mine! It's mine I tell you! And I want it back, as well as all of the profits made from it!
Gimme gimme!

Aw...what the heck. Keep your money. I have enough.

Trade Street Journal, Idea Management and Idea Consultants goes way back, and Darryl Parker and I were among the very first blokes in Charlotte to carpe the internet diem. For more on that history, see Idea Consultants blog. We are not a flash in the pan group of folks. We have been doing this for years. And we know the future. Our history bears this out.